learning game - quality

Quality exercise I’ve used a lot

You mention you will be writing documents so the following exercise will be useful as there’s an emphasis on having clarity around the standard, rather than having something subjective and open to interpretation.

Split into groups and give each group some M&Ms. Tell them they need to find ones with ‘good’ Ms printed on and reject the substandard ones. One by one, ask each member of the team to accept or reject each M&M (the others wait outside whilst each person is taking their turn). Keep a record of what each ‘quality controller’ said were good and which were rejects (we lay them out on a large numbered grid so they don’t get mixed up). Get the team back together and compare results. Are they all agreed on what good looks like and have they accepted / rejected the same ones?

You can then take this to another level by introducing a clearly defined customer specification with acceptable tolerances such as 80% of the M must be clearly visible, all yellow ones are an automatic reject and so on. Once everyone understands the specs, re-run the exercise and again compare results. Now, you should see a much closer alignment as the instructions are clear and people know what is expected of the product.

You can keep this exercise simple, or you can keep expanding on it by getting them to write their own quality work instruction (one point lesson, standard operating procedure or whatever you call it).

2 Responses

SteveRobson says:

March 27, 2015 at 7:14 am

Real life

If the problem is lack of attention to detail I would bring together as many examples as possible of real life examples of what you have found. A box of highlight pens in small groups and off you go…

You could also use Stephen Coveys "Old Lady" to highlight we only see what we are looking for or this does a similar job

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janehodgson says:

March 27, 2015 at 11:39 am

Quality exercise I’ve used a lot

You mention you will be writing documents so the following exercise will be useful as there’s an emphasis on having clarity around the standard, rather than having something subjective and open to interpretation.

Split into groups and give each group some M&Ms. Tell them they need to find ones with ‘good’ Ms printed on and reject the substandard ones. One by one, ask each member of the team to accept or reject each M&M (the others wait outside whilst each person is taking their turn). Keep a record of what each ‘quality controller’ said were good and which were rejects (we lay them out on a large numbered grid so they don’t get mixed up). Get the team back together and compare results. Are they all agreed on what good looks like and have they accepted / rejected the same ones?

You can then take this to another level by introducing a clearly defined customer specification with acceptable tolerances such as 80% of the M must be clearly visible, all yellow ones are an automatic reject and so on. Once everyone understands the specs, re-run the exercise and again compare results. Now, you should see a much closer alignment as the instructions are clear and people know what is expected of the product.

You can keep this exercise simple, or you can keep expanding on it by getting them to write their own quality work instruction (one point lesson, standard operating procedure or whatever you call it).